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Red House Young Writers’ Yearbook 2013 Competition

April 23, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Red House seeks talented young writers for 2013 Yearbook!

Do you know a budding writer, poet, or journalist? If so, the Red House Young Writer’s Yearbook needs YOU…
They want aspiring young writers from around the country to enter the 2013 Red House Young Writers’ Yearbook competition and win the chance to see their stories or poems published in a stunningly produced and designed book.

To enter the competition, children should be aged between 7 and 17. They can submit a story, poem or article and it’s up to the individual what subject they choose to write about. This year the competition entries will be divided into four age categories: 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+. The deadline is 31st July 2013.

As well as becoming a published author, the winners will also earn the opportunity to attend a Red House Young Writers’ Workshop, with a high-profile children’s author, held – for the first time ever- as part of the celebrated Imagine Children’s Festival at London’s Southbank Centre. The workshop will provide participants with a unique, fun and stimulating opportunity to help them hone their skills and provide lots of feedback to encourage and inspire!

Matt Whyman, author of Gold Strike and The Savages says:

The Red House Young Writer’s Yearbook aims to showcase young talent in the raw. It provides a platform for new writers as they get to grips with their craft, and offers a huge boost to their confidence in seeing their work in print for the very first time. Now with a series of workshops for the contributors, to be held at the Imagine Children’s Festival, it’s time to put your stories and poems into words and just see where it takes you.

http://my.redhouse.co.uk/content/red-house-young-writers-yearbook-2013-competition

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: competition, Red House, writing, young writers

Leicester branch of Waterstones to close | The Bookseller

April 23, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Former Dillon’s branch in Leicester to be closed by Waterstones

One of the two Waterstones shops in Leicester is to close with nine people under the threat of redundancy.
The Waterstones in Market Street, Leicester, will cease trading on 1st June, the company’s spokesman Jon Howells has confirmed.
Since Waterstones’ new management came in 2011, several stores have closed in towns or cities where there have been two Waterstones in close proximity to one another.

via Leicester branch of Waterstones to close | The Bookseller.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: bookshop, closure, Leicester, Waterstones

Barton joins Macmillan Children’s | The Bookseller

April 23, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

New Macmillan appointment:

Macmillan Children’s Books has appointed Stephanie Barton to the new position of pre-school publishing director, with Barton to join the company on 1st May.
Since 2010, Barton founded and ran Barton-Welby, an independent consultancy business specialising in children’s publishing and media. Barton was previously managing director of Penguin Children’s Books, and has also held further senior positions at DK and Penguin where she was responsible for the publishing and IP brand-management for Penguin Children’s imprints.

via Barton joins Macmillan Children’s | The Bookseller.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: appointment, jobs, Macmillan, publishing

Los Angeles Times Book Prize winners

April 22, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Ben Fountain’s satire "Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk" was named the winner of the L.A. Times 2012 book prize for fiction on Friday night at a ceremony in Los Angeles. Katherine Boo’s "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" took the prize in the current interest category.

The complete list of winners:

–Biography: Robert Caro, "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson" (Knopf)

–Current Interest: Katherine Boo, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" (Random House)

–Fiction: Ben Fountain, "Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk" (HarperCollins Publishers / Ecco)

–The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Maggie Shipstead, "Seating Arrangements" (Knopf)

–Graphic Novel/Comics: Sammy Harkham, "Everything Together: Collected Stories" (PictureBox)

–History: Fergus M. Bordewich, "America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union" (Simon & Schuster)

–Mystery/Thriller: Tana French, "Broken Harbor" (Viking)

–Poetry: Louise Glück, "Poems 1962-2012" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

–Science & Technology: Florence Williams, "Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History" (W.W. Norton & Company)

–Young Adult Literature: A.S. King, "Ask the Passengers" (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

Previously announced:

–Innovator’s Award: Margaret Atwood

–Robert Kirsch Award: Kevin Starr

via Announcing the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize winners – latimes.com.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: awards, book, fiction, Los Angeles, novel, prize, winners

Tim Waterstone Banking On Serialisation Being A Big Win

April 22, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Tim Waterstone thinks serialisation could be a “big win”:

Three months ago [Tim Waterstone] was approached by Neill Denny, the former editor of trade magazine The Bookseller, who was developing a new business venture called Read Petite – a subscription streaming service for short stories and serialised books for e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle.

‘I find the idea of a return to serialisation riveting,’ he says. ‘It could be a real big win. Get the first chapter out and get readers interested. Look what it was like in the 19th Century – Dickens was selling 100,000 copies through serial releases of his books.

‘There is also an opportunity for the release of non-fiction. It’s difficult for journalists to get works over 5,000 words published these days – something I could read if I’m on a plane journey to Barcelona, something I could read in one  sitting, to wildly misquote Edgar Allan Poe.’

Due to launch in the autumn, Waterstone says the company will accept only published authors on to its electronic service. He believes this will stop the system becoming ‘cluttered with slush’.

via THE INTERVIEW: 'I wouldn't dream of starting a book shop now,' says Tim Waterstone…Surprising warning from store chain's passionate founder | This is Money.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: ebooks, publishing, serialisation, serials, Tim Waterstone

Sarah McIntyre – what do authors need from our publishers?

April 22, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Very comprehensive blog post from Sarah McIntyre… Highly recommended

booktrust_babette_chris_zpsb5a297ef

We KNOW our publishers can’t do everything, that readers look to authors themselves to be inspired to buy their books, that publishers have limited budgets, and that it makes business sense not to devote quite as much of their time to a book that’s selling millions of copies versus a book that sells hundreds.

At the same time, we’re expected to be writers, artists, bloggers, e-mailers, stage performers and educators. (I itemised the jobs from my blog post, The McIntyre Way™, and added two more jobs: accountant and housewife. Possibly lobbyists, too.) I estimated that I can easily spend 70% of my time doing publicity work when, really, I’d rather spend 70% of my time writing and drawing. So what CAN our publishers do to help us so we actually have time to write and illustrate?

via Sarah McIntyre – booktrust at london book fair: what do authors need from our publishers?.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: authors, campaign, illustration, illustrators, promotion, publicity, publishers, publishing, self-publishing, selling, slush-pile, social media, Twitter

E.L. Konigsburg, Award-Winning Children’s Book Author Dies

April 22, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

E.L. Konigsburg, an author who twice won one of the top honors for children’s literature, has died. She was 83.

Her son Paul Konigsburg says the longtime Florida resident died Friday at a hospital in Falls Church, Va., where she’d been living for the past few years with another son. She had suffered a stroke a week before she died.

She won the John Newbery Medal in 1997 for her book "The View from Saturday" and in 1968 for "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler."

via E.L. Konigsburg Dead: Award-Winning Children's Book Author Dies.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: author, Newbery, obituary

HarperCollins Audience Development Director Jim Hanas

April 19, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Recommended interview from Digital Book World, with Jim Hanas, HarperCollins’ new director of audience development

HarperCollins, one of the world’s largest publishing companies, has been remaking its marketing efforts, starting with hiring a new chief marketing officer who comes from outside of book publishing, Angela Tribelli. As expected, Tribelli has started bringing on other professionals to help execute her vision.

Enter Jim Hanas, HarperCollins’ new director of audience development as of Feb. 2013. In other media companies, audience development departments help build lasting relationships with customers through email and data acquisition, social media engagement and more. Before his current role, Hanas had never held a position at a publishing house, but, in a way, he’s the ultimate insider when it comes to digital publishing.

Hanas comes to HarperCollins from the New York Observer, where he was the social media editor. There, he helped grow the social media audience of the New York media property while changing the culture of the newsroom. Prior to that, he held positions at New York-based start-up Sonnet Media, NYC & Company (where he worked with Tribelli), Print Magazine (sister publication to DBW), Radar Magazine and other media properties. He has a bachelor’s of philosophy and psychology from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and a master’s of philosophy from the University of Memphis.

In addition to his online media experience, Hanas has been publishing ebooks before most people in publishing knew what they were. He self-published his first ebook, Single, in 2006, a collection of two of his previously published stories – a radical experiment at the time. That release and other such experiments led him to an ebook publishing deal in 2010 with Toronto-based ECW Press for his story collection Why They Cried.

We spoke with Hanas about moving from online media to books, how he plans to help HarperCollins find an audience for each of its titles and how Digital Book World helped him get a leg up in digital publishing.

via HarperCollins Audience Development Director Jim Hanas: Finding an Audience, Book-by-Book | Digital Book World.

Link takes you to the interview…

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: audience, HarperCollins, publishing

What Is Agent Julia Churchill Looking For?

April 19, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

The agent as Treasure Seeker is probably a more alluring analogy than agent as celebrity manager (see previous blog post).
What kind of treasure is Julia Churchill, now at A M Heath, looking for? Find out in her own blog post:

When I was little, I was the dorkiest of waistcoat wearing metal detectors. Thankfully my dad is a big dork too, so we’d head out and treasure hunt on the weekends. We found the odd twisted piece of rust and scraps of whatever. But we also found 17th belt buckles, a cherub-shaped tankard handle, a diamond engagement ring from the 1930′s, a thick silver roman coin. I’m lucky that my job now is a treasure hunter. It’s an embarrassing truth that an agent feels a little like Indiana Jones for a day when they find their new treasured author. I don’t know quite what treasures I’ll be lucky enough to find as I start my new job here, but I’m looking hard and I know it when I see it.

via What Am I Looking For? | A.M.Heath.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: agents, metal-detector, treasure, wish-list

Literary Agents As Sports Agents Or Celebrity Managers

April 19, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

PW Weekly

Literary agent Andrew Lownie, speaking as one of the panellists at a late day panel on the Tuesday of the London Book Fair, says agents have become more like sports agents or celebrity managers:

Lownie… said agents have become more important, on some level, because there are now more rights available and contracts have become more complex. With digital publishing creating a host of new available rights, Lownie sees agents working as authors’ "copyright protectors," as much as someone who can help them because of their overall knowledge of the book market. In this way, Lownie noted, literary agents have become more like, "sports agents or celebrity managers," in so far as they now need to look after their author’s entire career.

So why do authors even need a publisher, if their agent can now publish for them? Lownie put it bluntly when he said that only a publisher can "get books into the supermarket." (In London, with the dissolution of many of the bookstores, the supermarket is one of the most important outlets for selling books.) To the end, Lownie said that while many authors can (and have) found success self-publishing, he thinks they will continue to need to seek out a traditional deal to "move to the next level." As examples of this, Lownie cited authors like E.L. James and Amanda Hocking, who both struck traditional print deals, after finding success self-publishing.

Both Lownie and Ogden said that, as the market continues to become more competitive, they believe more agencies will continue to merge. (In the U.K., agencies Conville & Walsh and Curtis Brown recently merged.) They also feel that everyone working in this business–authors, agents and publishers–will need to continue to become more innovative to survive. Nonetheless, certain realities of this business remain. As Lownie put, publishing it still "all about timing and luck."

via London Book Fair 2013: Defining the New Role for Literary Agents.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: agents, managers, publishing, rights

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